MEDICAL science at its most advanced is keeping Formula One legend Michael Schumacher alive.

Monitors flicker, drips empty into his immobile body and machines beep data only understood by the neurosurgeons battling to save him.

But what the high-tech gizmos cannot detect is the love that pulses out from the woman next to him.

The doctors now tasked with trying to save the life of the former world motor racing champion know that Corinna Schumacher’s brand of invisible medicine may turn out to be the most important remedy yet.

Corinna, 44, is truly the woman behind the successful man, the pit-stop wife. She was there for him throughout the 307 times he took to the Formula One circuits of the world. She is there for him now.

She has given few interviews since she wed Michael in 1995, devoting herself to him and their children Gina Marie, 16, and Mick, 14. She knew her image among media types was that of a provincial office clerk – blonde, perhaps a bit of an airhead, naive. It never bothered her.

Newspapers speculated at the time of their union that this was a marriage destined to have all the sparkle of a day-old glass of champagne: a confection dreamed up by Schumacher’s then publicity-hungry manager Willi Weber to maximise his global profile.

But when they met at a Ferrari party – she had broken up with another German racing driver Heinz-Harald Frentzen by then – the saleslady and the racer were spellbound.

“Rarely do you see a couple made for each other as the Schumachers seemed to be,” reported Stern magazine in Germany a year after their marriage. At the heart of the union was the instant knowledge that she could never tame him.

So the pact was this: Michael pledged love, honour, a family and riches if she would grant him the freedom to pursue his career no matter how high the stakes. She signed on the dotted line and stayed in the background.

Now she sits bathed in the green glow of the machines that are keeping her 45-year-old husband alive, surrounded by lucky charms

Over the years the glittering prizes of a fabulous, if extremely dangerous, lifestyle came her way. He bought her a ranch in Texas on their 10th wedding anniversary, built a beautiful home in Switzerland and acquired ski chalets, including the one in Meribel from where he set out on December 29 on his catastrophic ski run.

Money was never an issue. He earned an estimated £500million in his career – paying little tax on it because of his residency in Switzerland – and, until his accident, earned £7million a year as an ambassador for Mercedes, plus many tens of millions more in endorsement deals and investments.

She raised horses on the Texas ranch 90 miles from Dallas and became a European champion of “reining” – western-style riding – and has built up the business into a multimillion-pound concern.

Toward the end of his racing days she said: “Michael knows exactly what he’s doing and he knows that I am always behind him. He needs his challenges. Even now. I can well understand it and find that actually classy.”

Now she sits bathed in the green glow of the machines that are keeping her 45-year-old husband alive, surrounded by lucky charms. There is a hair brush by her side that belongs to their daughter.

There is the golden cross from his son, bought for him in 2006. There is an amulet of one of his employees called Lindsay that he took with him on every race.

And as of last Friday, the wooden-beaded Shamballa bracelet that was his talisman, found in the snow where he crashed his head against a rock on a low-speed run.

He once said of Corinna: “It is not so easy to find a partner who unconditionally adapts to the pace of my life.” But she did so willingly, accepting that his passion for racing was a part of his DNA.

And she said in happier times: “Michael’s passion for racing is just huge. It would have been impossible without this deep passion.

Schumacher crashing his car back in 2004, though he escaped unharmed [GETTY]

This passion has made him who he is. I got to know him as a racer and I had previously always had fullest confidence in him.”

Even so she made him promise after a 2009 motorcycle accident in Spain that almost landed him in a wheelchair that the days of thrills and spills must be tempered. He toned down his lifestyle, telling pals: “I garnered all the trophies, money and medals I wanted.

But the biggest prize of all, the only one that meant anything really, was Corinna.” He referred to his marriage as “total harmony”, adding: “We have the same vision of how we want to spend our lives. My wife Corinna and our harmonious family, that is my main force always at play in the background.”

In an interview with Germany’s ZDF TV channel days before his accident, Michael said that in all the years they have been together they have never had a serious fight.

“It’s because we shared the same values,” he commented. “During all the time I was racing she was my guardian angel.”

But the magic wore off on December 29 when, instead of driving at 200mph, he was skiing at less than 10mph, crashed and has now been in a medically induced coma for more than three weeks. The prognosis is not good and international neurological experts have warned that the longer it lasts, the less his chances are of coming out of it.

That is not what Corinna wants to hear, not what she believes.

A woman who lived in the shadows of his fame has now stepped into the spotlight of the world’s press, photographed every day entering the hospital in Grenoble where her soulmate struggles against colossal odds, leaving late at night for a few snatched hours of troubled sleep.

A family friend, who has known the Schumachers throughout their married life, tells me: “All the models, the groupies, the sex-on-legs pit-stop girls never meant a thing to Michael. Corinna was a small-town girl like he was a small-town boy, both from the same end of the country.

“They truly married their souls as well as their bodies. He doesn’t know she’s in the room with him in Grenoble but all the time that positive love is fl owing into him. No one loves him more than Corinna.

“If he should not come through this, then life as she knows it will also end. She could never love again.”